Categories

November refresh

It may have seemed that we have been a little quiet at Defacto2 of late but there has been a bit of work behind the scenes. This week a significant backend upgrade has been rolled out to improve usability and file navigation.

Redesigned the ‘Arts & files’, ‘Organisations’, ‘People’ and ‘Our favourite sites’ items navigation. To me it looks more cluttered but it should be more logical and easier to use. The categories and platforms have been given more meaningful names and have small descriptors that popup when the mouse is hovered over the link. While the navigation controls have now been clustered together. Thumbnails now have Sort By headers rather than being thumbnail icons lined side-by-side.

Introduced a HTML 3 edition of the site. Only the Art & files section of the site has been converted into this mostly text based, legacy format. I thought some people on slower connections or who are using legacy PC’s to obtain the hosted files would prefer this format. Plus seeing as the site is mostly focused on the online activities of the 1990s it seemed apt that we introduced a mock 1990s, web FTP edition of Defacto2. You can find this retro mode at www.defacto2.net/html3

Removed all the social network buttons within the site (except the welcome page) as they potentially tracked users and slowed the site down. If you want to remove all tracking (such as Google Adsense, Google Analytics etc) visit HTTPS://www.defacto2.net instead of HTTP://www.defacto2.net

Twitter has removed all support for RSS/Atom feeds which the Defacto2 welcome page relied on for the Twitter Wall function. This feature has been temporarily removed but will return once the it has been reproduced using Twitter’s 1.1v API.

Added improved tablet and mobile phone CSS optimisations.

Individual groups, sites and organisation now have their own XML feeds that you can use with a feed reader to track their new file submissions.